Sydney.

Got up after a very strange night and went to meet with a family of Aboriginal artists recommended to me by an artist friend of mine in Sydney. They have a company called Balarinji and do commercial work based on their own artwork. I was encouraged to see that they have worked with a lot of large companies (including Qantas) so would probably have a fighting chance of working to our deadline. They are a very interesting family, the father being John Moriarty whose mother, he told me, was tribal Aboriginal whilst his father was from Dingle. Yes, our very own Dingle in the west of Ireland. I couldnt help but laugh, but apparently there was quite a lot of interaction between the Irish and Australian Aborigines. John reckons they share a common bond of humour, storytelling and quick temper.

We looked at some of their designs and paintings and talked about what might work as an animated video piece. Tim Moriarty (Johns son) has a graphic design company, Indigraph, so is well placed to make some pieces for us. Even under the extremely compressed timescale I think we will be able to produce something very powerful. They were keen for me to understand the stories associated with the images, which mostly concern the nomadic lifestyle of their early culture - a culture which has continued unbroken for 100,000 years. Consequently Im very aware how important it is for us to get this right.

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Latest Willie's Diary

Within the bands entourage (certainly by comparison to the crews clockwork scheduling) travel departure times are often a little loose. This morning was especially so, due to three contradictory memos which had been emailed out last night and this morning.

There was a 6.30pm conference call arranged between Bono (Dublin), The Edge (Los Angeles), Steve Matthews (London) and myself (also London) to blow the cobwebs off our brains and discuss the reincarnation of the Vertigo Tour.

I was planning on resurrecting the tour diary today, being the day we were scheduled to fly to Auckland for the load-in tomorrow. However, its now old news that the remainder of the tour dates have been postponed, so Im not going anywhere further than the corner cafe. Its been a very weird week indeed - much akin to driving into a wall.